12 The Saint in London (The Misfortunes of Mr Teal)

It was a noise which had been going on, very faintly, for some time; but he had thought noth-ing of it. A car passing on another road half mile away might have caused it, and a subcon-scious suggestion of the same car drawing nearer had prevented him paying much attention to the first increase in its volume. But at this moment it had swelled into a steady drone that was too powerful and unvarying for any ordinary car to make, rising to the indefinable borderline of as-sertiveness at which his sense of hearing was jolted into sitting up and taking notice. He lis-tened to it, frowning, while it grew to sharp roar --and then stopped altogether.

The Saint remained as still as the tree beside which he stood, as if he had been an integral part of it, and looked out over the hedge at the field where the light was. Rising a little oh his toes, he was able to get a clear view of it and see the cause of the light.

A double row of flares was being kindled in the field, like a file of tiny brilliant bonfires--with a sudden jerk of understanding, he remembered other days in his life, and knew what they were. Mounds of cotton waste soaked in petrol or paraffin. Even while he watched, the last of them was lighted: a reddish glow danced in the dark, licked up into a tentative flame, and spring suddenly into blazing luminance. The shadow of the man who had lit it stretched out in a sudden long bar of blackness into the surrounding gloom where the light exhausted itself. The twin rank of flares was complete, forming a broad lane of light from northwest to southeast, six flares to each side, two hundred yards long at a rough guess. The dimension of the field beyond that was lost in the darkness which lapped the light.

Over his hear there was a rush of air and a dying hiss of wind as though a monstrous bird sighed across the sky. Looking upwards, he saw a shadow like a great black cross diving against the hazy luminousness of the clouds, barely skimming the tree tops: it plunged into the lane of light, gathering shape and detail--flattened out, bumped once, and landed.

Almost at the same moment the nearer flares began to flicker and die down. One of them went out; then another. . . .

"Never again, so long as I live, will I be rude to luck," the Saint said to Patricia Holm, much later. "For every dozen minor troubles the little lady gives us, somehow or other she manages to let you draw three to a straight flush and fill your hand--once or twice in a lifetime."

He stood, fascinated, and watched the flares going out. Fifteen minutes earlier, he might have run into no end of trouble, without profit to himself or anybody else; fifteen minutes later, there might have been nothing whatever to see; only the blind gods of chance had permitted him to arrive at the exact moment when things were happening. In the outer glow of the farthest flare he saw a man attaching himself to the tail of the aeroplane and beginning to push it farther into the darkness; in a few seconds he was joined by the pilot, unidentifiable in helmet and goggles and leather coat. The engine had been switched off as the ship touched the deck, and the last scene of the drama was played out in utter silence. The two men wheeled the machine away, presumably into some invisible hangar: the last flare wavered and blinked, and the fitful gloom of the night came down once again upon the scene.

Simon Templar drew a long deep breath and stepped back out of the shadow of his tree. Of all the sins which he might have accused the top hat and spats of Sir Hugo Renway of camouflaging, ordinary smuggling was the last; but he was always accessible to new ideas.

In this case the most obvious course which presented itself was a further and yet more sleuthlike investigation into the topography and individual peculiarities of March House; and with the sublime abandon of the congenitally insane he proposed to pursue the said course without delay. The last flare was finally extinguished, and the peaceful darkness settled once more upon the field. As far as anyone outside the estate could have told, the aeroplane had flown on across the Channel-- if any reflected glow of light had been visible beyond the belt of woodland through which he had passed, and the high fence beside the road, it could hardly have attracted any ordinary citizen's attention, and it had lasted such a short time that there would have been nothing particularly remarkable about it anyway. But to anyone who had been privileged to witness the performance from the inside, the whole thing was highly furtive and irregular, especially at the country house of a justice of the peace and permanent Treasury official; and the Saint could see nothing for it but to intrude.

And it was at that psychological moment that the moon, to whose coy tactics we have already had occasion to refer, elected once again to say peekaboo to the slumbering world.